Sometimes, life’s obstacles seem insurmountable. Then you see someone like Cornel Hrisca-Munn and you start to realize that just about anything is possible.

Hrisca-Munn has no arms, but this hasn’t stopped him from playing the drums. And he doesn’t just play the drums, he tears them up, delivering resounding beats and heart-thumping jams on the videos posted on his YouTube channel. It’s an inspirational story, but for Hrisca-Munn, learning to play drums was nothing compared to the struggles he had already lived through.

Hrisca-Munn was born with no forearms and a severely deformed right leg and given just days to live by the doctor in Romania. His birth mother left him an institution where, as The Telegraph memorably described, he was put in “a battered metal cot in a bare room crammed full of other unwanted or disabled babies, given a little milk and left to die.” But Hrisca-Munn survived, and at seven months old he was removed from the orphanage and taken to England, where he now resides.

At the age of 14, Hrisca-Munn placed second out of 400 contestants in a national drumming competition. In an interview with msnbc.com, Hrisca-Munn explained how he came to play the unlikely instrument:

“When I started high school I quite fancied learning a music instrument. I looked into it and thought the drums would be the only instrument I would be physically capable of,” he says. “I started having lessons, then a couple of years later started to teach. Over the years, I grew more and more passionate about the drums, and kept playing! I also taught myself to play the bass, and have been doing that for a few years.”

Did you catch that? He also plays bass. And when he’s not posting drum videos to YouTube, he’s also a student of philosophy and theology at Oxford University and is an active fundraiser for the disabled. Like we said, anything is possible.